Weird thoughts from a techie brain...

August 2017

Sun

Mon

Tue

Wed

Thu

Fri

Sat

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

About

This site is an effort to share some of the base knowledge I have gathered through all this years working with Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Python or Zope, among others. So, take a look around and I hope you will find the contents useful.

6- Some utilities to send the firmware files to the soekris using the RS-232 link. The easiest way to install them is using MacPorts (so if you don't have MacPorts installed on your system go ahead and install them now):

sudo port -v install lrzsz

Ok, now that we've everything we need, let's go for it!

First we have to attach one end of the RS-232 cable to the soekris box (I don't have pictures of this but you can use google to see how to do it with some pictures) and then we have to attach the other end to the usb-to-serial adapter. Then we have to connect the usb adapter to the MacBook.

Now we have to open Terminal.app and see if a device called /dev/tty.PL2303-SOMETHING exists. Just use ls this way:

ls -l /dev/tty.PL2303-*

You should see something like /dev/tty.PL2303-00001004 (the number after the - will be probably different, as it changes depending on the OSx version and the usb-to-serial adapter itself). If the device does not exist, OSx does not recognize the hardware and you need to install some stuff before using it. Just get the needed drivers from here:

This time it is version 1.32, a little bit outdated as latest version is 1.33c.

Ok, we have to press ctrl+p when the BIOS asked us to do it (otherwise the boot process will go on, trying to boot from an attached CompactFlash card, a hardrive or using PXE Boot). Once we've pressed the shortcut, we will see a command prompt where we can use some commands to interact with the soekris BIOS. There is even a small help containing a list of available commands:

For the purpose of upgrading the firmware/BIOS, we need two of those commands, download (to get a copy of the new firmware) and flashupdate (to perform the upgrade).

This is the tricky part. In the prompt, we run the following command:

> download -

We will see a message like this one:

Start sending file using XMODEM/CRC protocol.

And we will have some time to send the new firmware file using XMODEM. As we can read in the official docs, we are supposed to press ~+ and then write a command (lsz -X) that will send the firmware files to the soekris.

But, as I found out after so many tries, it doesn't work. I tried using so many key strokes and combinations and I wasn't able to do it, until I tried one hell of a dirty trick: I just wrote the whole command somewhere else (in another tab of Terminal.app for example):

~+sz -X b5501_133c.bin

I copied it (command+c) and I pasted it (command+v) in the Terminal.app tab where cu was running. and it worked!:

And et voilá, we've done the firmware upgrade. As I told you at the beginning of this small article, it was difficult at first, because I was getting on my nerves trying to reproduce the steps from the official docs one time and another. I still don't know what the problem is, and why it is not working just writing the command, but the copy&paste trick just worked fine.